I wonder how we would read the Bible if we were from an Eastern collectivist culture instead of a Western individualist culture. In our culture, we keenly feel the individual pain in this story. Dinah had suffered harm. Who would help her? But in a collectivist culture of shame and honor, the community of Jacob’s family had been shamefully treated by another community.
“A thing that should not be done” had been done. The local leader’s son Shechem had harmed Jacob’s daughter Dinah. What did Jacob do to comfort Dinah? How could she be helped through this tragic assault? We might expect Jacob assemble his sons and servants to form a war party, as Abraham had done to rescue Lot. Instead, he waited until his sons returned home.
Hamor, the leader of the local Hivite community came over and offered intermarriage as a solution. He tried to smooth over his son’s behavior by saying that Shechem wanted to marry Dinah. Was this true or was it a way of covering over his son’s sin? It may have been both. Hamor saw the rape as an entrepreneurial opportunity. “Why not just assimilate with our people?” he offered. You can live in our land, trade in it and acquire property in it.” Shechem offered to pay a high bride price in order to marry Dinah.
Not everything is for sale. Nor can money solve every problem. As an image-bearer of God and a daughter in the line of a family chosen by God, Dinah possessed great intrinsic worth. All of the Hivite efforts to assuage the collective anger of Jacob’s family was to no avail.
How do we find peace? In our headlines these days, world leaders seem to imply that life and death, war and peace are primarily economic challenges which can be solved through negotiations. All this war wastes a lot of money! With gratitude for those who seek peace, we notice the implication seems to be that a good business transaction can solve the problems. But in the Middle East and in Europe and Asia, countless lives are being lost. Children are starving. Women have been harmed. Other children have been kidnapped. Without question, land and economics play a key role in the conflicts. But there is also the matter of honor and shame. No amount of money can fix the harm. Each human life is priceless in the eyes of God who made us. The blood of brothers and sisters cries out to God from the soil.
